Practical and Helpful Tips: Labs

What Is A Medical Laboratory

A medical laboratory is a place where the tests for the clinical specimen will be done in order to get the information needed for the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of a disease on a patient. Clinical laboratories focus on applied science mainly on the production-like basis not like the research laboratories that focus on basic science on an academic basis.

Laboratory medicine usually have two departments on which each unit will be divided into a number of different units. You can read more about the two departments below.

Anatomic pathology – electron microscopy, histopathology, and cytopathology are the units included in this department. Each of those units can be studied alone in a single course, try checking this page. The other courses related to this section are histology, pathophysiology, pathology, and physiology.

Clinical pathology that contains the following:

Clinical microbiology – this course surrounds five various units of science. Mycology, immunology, bacteriology, parasitology, and virology are the units included here!
Clinical chemistry – the units that are under this section are toxicology, endocrinology, enzymology, and the instrumental analysis of blood components.
Hermatology – the manual and automated analysis of the blood cells are the units that are under this section. The blood bank and the coagulation are the two subunits in this section.
Genetics is studied also alongside a subspecialty which is the cytogenetics.
Reproductive biology – assisted reproductive technology, semen analysis, and sperm bank are in this section.
The distribution of clinical laboratories to each health institutions will be different from place to place. For example, some facilities may have one laboratory intended for microbiology while some health institutions might have different labs for each unit without a single lab for microbiology.

Learn more about the detailed analysis of the role of each laboratory equipment for hermatology and urinalysis below.

You should take note of the clinical specimen that can be received by microbiology like the possible infected tissues, urine, synovial fluid, sputum, blood, cerebrospinal fluid, feces, and swabs. The main work here is focused on cultures, looking for possible pathogens that if found, will be identified further based on biochemical tests. There will also be a need to know if a pathogen is resistant or sensitive to a given medicine by doing a sensitivity test. Results will be reported together with the determined organism or organisms, and the type and quantity of drugs that will be given to a patient.

Different class of medical laboratories
There are two main types of medical laboratories that will process most of the medical specimens in a lot of countries. The laboratories that are attached to the hospitals will perform different tests for the patients. The samples from health clinics, general practitioners, clinical research sites, and insurance companies will be analyzed in private laboratories. You can look into a website if you want to know more about medical laboratories.